Digital twin for Industrial Internet

Abstract

Industrial Internet upgrades the traditional industrial manufacturing to digitization, networking and intellectualization era, which calls for brand-new technology supports. As a promising solution, the emergence Digital Twin (DT) offers enhanced digital mapping capability with strong feasibility, security, economic and intelligence, which fits well with the concept of Industrial Internet. In this paper, we focus on establishing a new reference architecture of DT to support the development of Industrial Internet. It is composed of three interdependent layers (i.e., physical layer, DT layer and DT networks layer) and four critical attributes (i.e., privacy, security, awareness and real-time). We illustrate our perspectives for the functionality and relationship of the three layers, and features and feasible solutions of the four attributes. With those efforts, the proposed DT architecture can provide both smart manufacturing and networked services for Industrial Internet era. Moreover, we also illustrate the relevant and open challenges. Finally, the conclusion and future perspective are pointed out.